Power in Potentia
by sovery
Summary: Molly can't imagine this is how Jim expected their confrontation to go.
She might not have relapsed if Jim hadn't shown up at her apartment. He's wearing a beautiful suit (she misses the days when men knew the value of a good tailor) and a terrifying smile, a dead thing which doesn't reach his pretty eyes. He's got a gun pointed at her head. She blinks slowly, making no sudden movements, unable to help herself from feeling put-upon.

She had dated this man- or his guise anyway. Coming back here, especially after the whole gay-incident, was rude enough on its own. The gun was just icing on the cake at this point.

"Close the door, Molly," he says, softly. She turns her body slightly, sliding her practical purse down her arm to better free her wrist. The sound it makes as it skids across her raincoat seems artificially loud.

"Slowly, darling," he adds, his tone light and conversational. With her expression hidden from him, she permits herself an eye roll. She isn't sure if she wants to participate in this cliche. Should she let him kill her now? Would he risk it?

She turns back to face him, slowly, as he had ordered, and he studies her carefully. Her expression is the kind of blank that could be due to shock, or horror, but he might be clever enough to tell otherwise, if he bothers to look. Whatever his powers of perception, he seems both a little surprised and pleased by her demeanor, and steps closer. She doesn't move. Her face is as smooth as a bowl of milk, as a marble bust, and he seems to have abandoned the exaggerated mannerisms which marked his stint as a cheerful IT worker. He glances behind her - at the kitchen window most likely, and gestures for her to back up, and she obeys, retreating until they stand in her windowless bedroom, a few steps inside the paper thin door.

"I was just thinking Molly," he continues, his voice lilting more than it nearly ever had in the month they'd spent together, "that you might be feeling a little lonely, as it were. A little left out of the loop."

"I'm fine," she says, not giving much away. Jim raises an eyebrow in extravagant disbelief.

"Are you sure?" he asks, dragging out the last word, flicking the safety off of the gun. She looks him in the eyes. They are as dark as ever, but the artificial warmth he'd managed to put there was gone. He had been like Splenda in coffee- not as nice as the real thing- but still sweet, despite the aftertaste. Better than nothing.

"I have a cat," she replies, quirking her lips in the queer half smile that Sherlock hates so much. Another flicker of surprise. She's being a little naughty tonight. Not much concern for appearances. Again, she wonders if she should let him kill her. It might be easier than the alternative.

"Somehow darling, I don't quite believe you," Jim confides. Well. That's his problem.

It's clear in that moment that he's going to shoot her. The slack, bored expression that settles over his face heralds the tightening of his trigger finger and Molly allows herself to flop back on her bed, the bullet speeding over her head and penetrating the headboard with a jarring pop. She tightens the muscles in her legs even before her back hits the duvet and uses the momentum to propel herself up. She flings herself at Jim before he can get another shot off, catching his hand with one of hers and this throat with the other. She slams him into the wall, and before he can make more than an inarticulate cry, she sinks her teeth into his neck.

Oh, but she had missed this. The rush of fresh blood, nearly untainted, warm and with the slightest amount of alcohol, hot and delicious as it slides down her throat causes her to make a little moan as she drinks him down. It has been far too long.

After a few lovely long moments she shoves him away from her. Wouldn't do to kill him in her apartment. She doesn't feel all that inclined to kill him anyway. She doesn't care to admit it, but he holds a lot more interest for her now that she knows he's sort of evil.

"I was a nun you know," she says conversationally, licking his blood off her fingers. "Back in the day."

Jim looks like a gutted fish, and not just because she'd drained him nearly to the point of unconsciousness.

"I didn't actually believe in God of course," she adds, as if that would explain away, "but it was better than the alternative. Marriage," she clarifying, giving an affected little shudder. "Scary stuff. I went and became an anchoress. My parents, rest their souls, were quite happy their daughter was in such favor with God."

She had a different name then. She'd had lots of different ones since. Still, she had liked it well enough. She'd been alone a lot, with her books and her garden and the local priest for company. He'd been a kind man, with more intelligence than most she'd met during her brief life. That was at least one thing she could credit the intervening generations with- they had gotten much smarter.

Despite the myths, religious imagery had no effect on her kind. They hadn't used the word vampire back then- there were just rumors followed by deaths followed by nothing, or else some unlucky town-person taking the blame and facing mob justice - and Molly didn't like to cause enough trouble that the local wise woman was burned as a witch. Not when they were usually some of the most intelligent conversation she was likely to get.

"But then this happened," she says, smiling at him with his blood on her mouth. She looks for, and sees, the burning curiosity and desire in his eyes, even as he struggles to keep them open. Whether or not it had been his original plan, Jim had wanted to hurt her emotionally before he killed her. Molly has lived long enough to know when a man was playing, and when he was finished. The same madness that had lurked behind Tobias' eyes when he had entered her sanctuary and drained her of her life, that had driven him to ever bolder acts of sacrilege and destruction, animated the man on her floor.

She watches, detached, as his fingers twitch. Tobias had been interesting, but he had also been a sadistic liability that needed to be put down like the mad dog he was. He had never suspected she might be the one who would end his artificially long life. But then, she had never been the sort of girl who had aroused much suspicion. And she still gave a few pounds to the homeless woman who sat outside Pret when she saw her, and was kind to children and animals, and she had volunteered as a nurse in three wars, before the government identifications became a liability, never killing her patients except as a mercy, so perhaps it wasn't warranted. Unless you were a cruel man, who thought to much of your power, and too little of your would-be victims.

And so, it is with a thousand years of spite that she asks, gently, "Can you imagine what it's like to live forever?" She watches him struggle to keep his eyes focused on her, the irrepressible spark of interest that flickers in cold depths. And then, to arouse his hopes before she crushes them -

"Would you like to find out?"


End file.
